When do you end a hexcrawl? I’ve been thinking about this off and on for the last month. And I finally figured out why I was asking the question. Very useful, the why, and that will be most of what I ramble about as we go on, but it doesn’t solve the question.

This is not the first walkabout campaign I’ve run. Shadows Beneath Hanjuku ended up being that sort of campaign, to its detriment, probably. The Spelljammer campaign did as well. Hanjuku I ended when I was down to four players, half of whom hadn’t been there since the beginning. My campaigns are rather premise-heavy, and it’s really hard to onboard people into a premise. Spelljammer I did not examine closely as to why I was unsatisfied, but I just felt it was time to move on.

I’ve been getting flashes of “Time to move on” with the current campaign, Ravonn’s Tower. Just flashes, mind you. Then I run a session that is perfect and makes me excited to run the campaign. On reflecting, I’ve identified my issue. It’s the great campaign killer. The big burnout boogeyman. 

I’ve realized that the game I want to run on paper is not the game that is being run at the table. And that is SUPER IMPORTANT to know.

This gives me three options, and I’ll probably be trying all three at some point. Change, Adapt, and Quit. Yes, I know there’s no real difference between changing and adapting. But in this particular instance, Change is going to refer to how we do things at the table, Adapt is altering the rules, aka what I want on paper, and then Quit is to stop this campaign and do something else.

What’s the problem?

Looking at my rules doc, I have about 2100 words that are currently on the chopping block (Never fear, I don’t actually delete things. They get retired to a different document, where they can run in the fields all day.) If you’re familiar with my Ravonn’s Tower ruleset, it’s the Expedition section, and everything related to it.

These rules are written with the expectation that the world clock (game clock?) is working with distinct segments of time, ten segments to each adventuring day. Everything is designed around spending those segments. I think it does its job, when the game proceeds like that. But I’m discovering in gameplay that regimented time segments aren’t how players think. Which is totally fair. Players are more event-driven. They’re going to do things like “Head to that landmark” or “Go west” or “Mine until we have all that we can carry”, and then they interact with the interruptions that the GM responds with. 

This is one of those things that video games do really well. Sure, you’ve set your sights on walking to the one landmark, but as you begin your trip, you have instantaneous visual feedback, allowing you to get distracted and deviate, and also there are a thousand microdecisions. Sure, you’re heading west, but do you go up the mountain? Or go around to either side? Natural pathing decisions happen as you play, perhaps even unconsciously. It’s hard to even think of it as pathing, it happens so naturally. In TTRPG space, decisions don’t happen that fluidly. It falls into the RPG cycle, of the DM describing something, the players picking action, and then the DM explaining the resolution, repeat. But for travel, I find often that the conversation is me describing points of interest, and then waiting to see if the players are interested, and then they say we continue, and it feels like a wasted moment. 

Something that I just realized might play in as a factor is the multiplayer aspects. It can be difficult at the table to want to investigate something that other people might not be interested in. In those video games, often a player is on their own, and is experiencing the world individually. If they are part of a group, often that group gets separated and means to join back up together. I’ve certainly had plenty of experiences like that. 

That might be something that I can attempt to fix. A system where a particular player is the main character for the session, and gets to make the decisions. To have them be the individual that everyone else is tagging along with, there might be something interesting there. I certainly don’t think that would work for every table, though. I can call up experiences of tables where that would not be a good idea. Chaotic characters, chaotic players even. People with very different goals who are at the same table because of inertia and not actual intention. 

I could change my approach, and make it a lot more board gamey. I recently picked up a new board game that I feel might be 80% of what I want out of RT. It’s called Earthborne Rangers. Travel between nodes on the map, you have to spend effort to travel along that path, as well as engage with that particular deck of cards that is associated with that location. So what occurs at each location is random, how long it takes to travel from Point A to Point B is based on your priorities and how much trouble you get into along the way, and I’m kind of interested in that idea. It seems to have a lot going for it. 

I could absolutely see stealing a lot of those mechanics to make the board game aspect of overland travel work even better. There’s only a single flaw with it that I can think of, which is the fact that my players are out of level where they can handle a lot of random encounters with the potential of not spending resources. And that is not how Earthborne Rangers functions, as one character might be able to get through encounters without issue, but as soon as one of the Ranger’s deck of cards is out expended, then the game is over for everybody. And the characters go home. 

That is actually a pretty tempting rule set. What if night rests weren’t a thing? Nobody really uses them, but the idea behind them is as part of the tracking of time. The regimented clock includes recovery time. But if I get rid of the regimented clock, do I still need that recovery time? Or is every resource that is spent just a tick closer to everybody needing to go back to town. I don’t hate that concept. 

I could absolutely see attempting something like that in the future. I don’t think I could do it as part of the current campaign. It would be a massive pivot away from the current method of doing things, and that makes things a bit tricky. And as part of that, it’s sort of not playing D&D anymore. Which is a small concern. I would have to put in some work to make that feel like D&D. But, honestly, I could see a deck based random encounter concept where as you explored various areas, you could reduce the number of certain threats. I don’t hate it. I might have to try and build that for a future campaign. 

Changing and quitting have a lot more overlap than I’d like. Quitting the current season of Ravonn’s Tower and starting another with some revamped mechanics is certainly on the table. I had considered doing it in January, actually. Not a full revamp, but trying out some experimental rules, but that ended up not really working for me 

So to recap the section, just in case I muddied the waters, my current rule system is designed for something similar to board game style travel, and as I’ve actually been playing, player interactions have encouraged me to run the game in more of a narrative style. And while there might be one or two interesting concepts to explore in the idea of changing how I’m running the game to match the rules better, I’m not feeling a solution.

Adapting the rules 

Which brings us to the hard part. My rules are insufficient. Time to trade these suckers in for some new rules. Do I know what those are? Nope! As the section starts, I haven’t a clue. 

So, let’s start with my requirements. What should the new expedition system allow people to do? 

Fair warning: the next little segment until the next chapter heading is pretty much stream of consciousness. As I’m getting thoughts, I’m refining them enough to write them down and show them in public, but I have no idea what’s staying, what’s going, and the thoughts aren’t full. Might be a little disjointed.

An expedition has a destination. It also has a direction? A path? Getting from A to Z involving that particular set of steps. This could be as simple as “Head west”, or “We’re taking canoes south on the river from Ravonn’s Tower to the jungles, and then we disembark and go across land until we get to the mesa.” A nice clean route. Route is a good word for it. 

When do players make decisions? When do they decide the route? I wish I could find some way to make it so players would want to travel part way, and perhaps change their mind about the final destination. I’ve not felt any of that. Once they set a goal, they tend to just go. 

On the route, there should be encounters. Not just challenges, not just danger, sometimes things that are good. Earthborne Rangers has some neat little interactions between predators and prey and plants. It’s going to be hard to not steal from that. 

I might just build this for Pale Tree Swamp, and see if I can make that one region very interesting with this method. 

Author’s note: between paragraphs, I actually played Earthborne Rangers. The interaction system that I was promised didn’t emerge in the way I was promised. I can see that it’s there, but I don’t know if it was just solo play doesn’t have as many opportunities with encounters. When cards are designed to interact, but the rules have each player drawing a card, a solo player ends up with one card with nothing to interact with. It’s possible this might change, because there’s a weather mechanic and who knows if I’m playing things correctly. But I was able to do a lot more without spending resources than I thought I should. 

What is time? What is distance? Is there really any problem with the party saying “We start at <landmark>”? Currently I have Fast Travel dealing damage. What does that add? Does it strain disbelief to never deal with night? 

I would feel that something was missing if the players never had to camp. That feels like a decision. That camping is a trigger point. Things build up over time mechanically, and camping resets them. It’s been a while since I’ve brought out the Bowl of Doom. 

Placing dice into the bowl sort of feels like marking the passage of time, it also feels like it would be a thing that happens when you do something loud. It would also be interesting if you move a die to the bowl when you take a short rest. 

The bowl has six dice. When it is full, the dice get rolled. A clock mechanism, where each die that is moved to the bowl advances the current time. Consider that instead of each die just being an hour, making camp advances to morning. Instead of recovering hit dice, maybe camping for the night gives xd6 just health to the party. Chef’s guild might kick that up a day. 

I think I found my tool, but I have no idea how to make it interface with anything yet. When do we add dice? What happens when we roll them? I’ve got no idea on either side, but the mechanical feel of moving time and adding dice to the bowl feels like there’s something there. Now I’ve just got to wire it into a storytelling travel campaign. 

Ironically, the Bowl of Doom comes from the AngryGM’s thoughts on wilderness travel. And a phrase like that means that I should go read a blog post or two, just to make sure that I’m not rehashing old ground and that Angry didn’t solve this years ago. 

Very solid read from Angry. Nothing that quite resolves all of my issues, but complications are an interesting concept. They aren’t exactly encounters. What it makes me think of are adventure modifiers. For instance, I’ve not been dealing with the weather. I had grand ideas about the weather when I was doing broad strokes for the campaign, never got anywhere. It just didn’t make sense to play it like that at the table. 

Earthborne Rangers has a weather card based on the current day in the adventure, and as you play through that day the weather changes a little bit which has some mechanical effect. 

So what if we roll the bowl, a complication is rolled, and it comes up with a change in the weather. And it goes from being a sunny day to a windy day. And maybe there’s some mechanics of it being a windy day. And that windy day sticks around until the end of the expedition, unless complications change it into something else. 

Think of it a little like antibodies. Gradually, an expedition adds more and more until the incursion is dealt with. Or, to think of it the other way, at the start of an expedition, your gear is in perfect condition, you have all of the rations you need, you’ve waited for the weather to be perfect, you’ve had a full night’s sleep, it’s the ideal conditions. But as the trip goes on, little bits of wear and tear, bits of stress, all begin to add up. And eventually, you’re ready to go home. 

Complications being mostly permanent add-ons to the expedition feels like it’s going to be a big win. Immediately, one of the things I can do because of it is to drop down the random encounter chance. Currently, I’m rocking a five-in-six chance as the party enters the place, and vaguely goes down as they deal with encounters? I’ve just sort of been free balling it since I did the change to fast travel, which had a small subtle change in that tracking the pressure in regions stopped mattering. 

Anyway, at the start of the adventure, I can have some areas have a lower chance of random encounters. Random encounters and exploration would be something that put a die into the bowl. Items that take time will also take time. Or a die. So if the party decides that they want to climb up a mesa, or down a mesa, and I feel that for whatever reason it’s complicated enough, that might take a die. 

 I’m not actually worried about this system in the jungle. I’m worried about it on the plains. Where the party has made the choice of just “Head north”, and there’s nothing to see, and there’s nothing to do, and I don’t know how to track time. 

I guess it doesn’t have to be a literal one-on-one conversion. I could spin my time wheel and advance it to night, and add only one die into the pool. That essentially means an easy day has passed, and you’ll have essentially no chance of complications that first day. 

I think I like it? Let me write out all of the rules as I remember them, and look them over real quick

New Travel Mechanics 

There are two new mechanics to track the passage of time. First, there is the sundial, which shows the current time of day. When the party does something that passes time, a die is added to the Bowl of Doom. When the bowl is full, the dice in it are rolled and if a one comes up, a complication gets added to the party. 

A die is also added to the pool when a combat encounter occurs, when one or more people take a short rest, when something particularly loud happens, or as payment for various expedition actions that the party can undertake.

Complications remain with the party until they are resolved. All complications are resolved at the end of the expedition, and for many of them that’s probably going to be the only way. 

Yeah, I think I like them as rules. It allows me to still tie in expedition actions, in case the party wants to go on a prospecting trip or construct something new. I might rebuild that so that everything takes the same amount of time, so that if they decide to individually explore, everyone can be doing something. 

Going back over all my thoughts, there are two things that I want to address. Night’s rest and Fast Travel. And I think they’re related. 

I had thought damage was the way time got tracked, but actually, on reflection, that’s not exactly accurate. I think it’s the push-your-luck concept. At some point, you look at your board state and think okay, it’s time to call it. Damage is certainly part of that calculation. But I think complications are actually going to be more impactful. So adding a die to the bowl for every node traveled might end up being more impactful than damage. I want players to go further. Damage was sort of encouraging them to stay at home. So if I make the rule that every six nodes you go, Fast Travel creates a complication that is immediately in play, and then all the excess nodes become dice in the Doom bowl, then we are immediately engaging with that, and I don’t have to deal with explaining how much damage people need to take, making sure that happens. It was working really well for the two players who are really on top of my rule system. Onboarding new people hasn’t been great. Especially since with the new sessions, we are doing the fast travel maybe once a month, if that? And that’s a lot of time for people to forget the mechanic. So pulling it out of player interaction and bringing it to me works. 

I’m thinking of pivoting on the night’s rest. Nobody has interacted with the spending hit dice to regain spell slots. That’s just not been a thing. And I’m kind of okay with that. I think a night’s rest is going to give the advantage of a short rest, maybe some of the other stuff from the rest list, and everybody in the party is going to regain a certain amount of hit points. So it’s free healing, to take a night’s rest, but you do have the dangers of encounters. Which gets more likely and dangerous the longer you linger.

That may have been a bit vague with numbers, because I don’t have them figured out yet. I need to go and figure out all of the little details. And write a bunch of complications. What the complications can do are going to modify what the party is able to do. It’s all connected, but I think I like the structure that I’ve come up with. And now I need to do the hard part of the game design. 

Thanks for coming along with me on this journey. I’m excited for the next chapter of developing the supersystems for Ravonn’s Tower. This isn’t going to be fully implemented until the next expedition that the party goes on. They are in a bit of a story right now. Got to resolve that first. But soon. And we’ll see how well it works.

This hexcrawl ain’t over yet.